Spanish language stuff part 2: Learning Spanish

I've been trying to learn Spanish for ages, long before we got here 17 years ago. In fact I started my first Spanish class in 1983. I'm talking about evening classes, maybe an hour or two per week for a ten week term. It takes a long time to clock up the hours especially when you consider that you're usually in a class with maybe a dozen other people. The important thing about the classes was the routine, the commitment. Doing a class meant homework exercises, grinding through verb tables and learning lists of vocabulary. However many times someone tries to sell you a course that they promise will teach you Spanish (or any other language) in a few hours just consider this. Imagine you want to learn a poem or a literary quote in your native language. You'll know the words and you'll know the pronunciation, all you have to do is remember the words in the correct order. How long do you reckon it might take? It used to take me ages to learn those "O" level Shakespearean quotes. If it really were true that you could speak Spanish with just 1000 words, and you took just five minutes to memorise each word, you'd still need 83 hours of parrot fashion learning before you got to the variations and the combinations. What it comes down to is that language learning is, principally, a huge memory task and there is no way around that.

How much you try to remember is a matter of personal choice and willingness. Richard Vaughan, quite a famous teacher of English here in Spain, always stresses that learning common words pays dividends over learning less common ones. The example I've heard him use more than once is between the verbs to sleep and to be. To sleep isn't exactly an obscure verb but in comparison to the verb to be it is. The trouble with that theory is that certain words are common under certain circumstances. You hardly ever know when the circumstances will arise when you will need more words. The verb to fry and the nouns egg and chip aren't particularly common words (In the Richard Vaughan sense) but in a greasy spoon, when you want fried egg and chips, they are. 

Use and repetition is important too. Once upon a time I used Excel spreadsheets and Access databases. I was never good with them but I knew the basics. I haven't used them for years now and I wouldn't have the faintest idea where to begin with designing a simple database. You may think that living in Spain I would use the language all the time, and I do, but most of my conversations are very simple transactions. In the supermarket, in the bar, where a couple of stock phrases will suffice. I often greet people in the street and exchange a few words about their family or the weather but it's very seldom that the conversation strays to the movement of refugees or US Foreign Policy or even a bit of gossip about some event in the area. In this sort of case Richard Vaughan's common phrases and words theory works well. It's like the Spanish waiter or waitress on the coast. They speak to their British customers in English but most of those waiters and waitresses don't really speak English, they speak the menu. 

All this said my Spanish isn't too bad nowadays. I can nearly always get what I want though there may be a lot of fumbling and stumbling along the way. I can read a newspaper, listen to the radio, watch the TV and even read the car handbook. With the online conversation I can even practise real conversations. But my Spanish is still far from good. If I'm watching a film at the cinema I can lose the thread completely. Understanding the lyrics of songs is usually beyond me unless I see them written down and even in something as commonplace as watching the TV news my understanding lets me down from time to time. While I can overhear, and understand, something said in English through all sorts of extraneous sounds and in all sorts of unfavourable circumstances I need a following wind to not lose the thread in Spanish. 

After all this time and all the effort it is frustrating beyond belief.

Talk to the screen

I shouldn't have chosen 7.30 in the morning. It seemed like a good idea. I thought that an hour at the start of the day wouldn't interfere with any other plans. Anyway with aching bones and a weak bladder I'm nearly always up at 7.30. Besides the session was online so I only had to look dressed from the neck up - no problem with wearing loose fitting shorts and yesterday's odorous t-shirt. Skype doesn't yet transmit body odours. The reason it wasn't such a good idea was that I woke up around 5am and didn't really get back to sleep for worry that I'd miss the appointed hour!

It was the first time that I'd ever done a Spanish class online. Somebody told me about an app that they had been told was easy to use to arrange online lessons. The one I used is called italki though I'm sure there are tens if not hundreds of others. I looked through the tutors first. The tutors are from all over the world so you have to think about accents - for Spanish I chose someone from Spain rather than someone with a Venezuelan or Mexican accent. All of the tutors seemed to have different prices though the majority seemed to be in the 7€ to 8€ range. I think one person was 23€ an hour. They must either be very good or as misguided as that bloke who once tried to sell me a very expensive Land Rover. I bought a discounted 10 lesson pack, 10 hours of classes, for $70, or about 65€ with one specific tutor. In general though I think that you buy credit with the organisation which you can then spend with any of their tutors. I'm still a bit novice with the system but it appears that the app puts you in contact with the tutor, arranges the session times and takes your money. The lesson with the tutor happens on Skype or Facetime or whatever the Google equivalent is called this week.

I can see lots of advantages to doing languages online and very few disadvantages. The application gives you a brief bio of all the tutors, which languages they speak, where they are based, how much they cost etc. All the teachers have a little introductory video so you can hear them speak. You can buy individual lessons or packages and most of the tutors offer a free or reduced price test session. So, for very little money you can give it a go. If you don't like the tutor, if you don't like their style, if you have technical problems or if you just think better of it you can simply say goodbye at the end of the session with none of the trauma of abandoning a more traditional class. I suppose too you could also book lots of sessions in a very short period to get an intensive course or you could take lessons from several different tutors for variety and, as long as you can get a decent connection you can take the class from wherever you happen to be.

The bloke I spoke to was very good; nice and easy to talk to. I've booked up for a second session but this time I'm not starting quite so early.

And you all feel so superior and expert

One of my little jokes is that I like paying Spanish taxes. I say it gives me the right to complain about Spanish politicians. Now I'm going to argue that after eleven years here I have a right to express an opinion about Spain.

I wrote a little essay for a Spanish class I do and I posted it on this blog. It was no more than a writing exercise for the teacher but when it was done I thought it was a whimsical look at things I noticed in Spain - good coffee, bad tea, uninformative notices - little inconsequential things. Perfect for the blog.

Nobody much comments on my blog but I got one about that article. At first the chap (I think it's a man) was just putting me right. I said there was no good British style tea to be had in Spanish cafés and he told me about the varieties, methods and what not of making a range of teas all of which were available in Spain. Fair enough, not the same point but fair enough. As his reply lengthened though it changed tone. He doesn't seem to be too keen on we Britons. Again, fair enough, if his experience of us is bad then that's his experience. He didn't seem to care for me much either or at least what I write.

He also made a comment on an article I wrote about swearing. My basic premise was that Spaniards swear less forcibly but more frequently than Britons. As you may imagine my post was full of explanations, qualifications and exceptions. Now here we had a different mode of attack. He simply told me that I was wrong. I don't think so. I may have a different experience to him or a different interpretation but I am not wrong. I can see swearing on the television, hear it on the streets and in the bars and I have been unpleasantly surprised by the frequency of swearing amongst my sub teen pupils. It may be true that I notice the use of strong English language swearing by Spaniards more than the home population. After all I know what it means and how forceful its meaning is because I am English but I would not notice it if it were not said.

This chap though did make me wonder about the generalisations that I make in a lot of the posts. We all gather information from around us and extrapolate - all Swedes are blonde, all Ecuadorians are short, all Andalucians are full of the joys of life. All obviuosly untrue but all good healthy stereotypes. So when does extrapolation become stereotyping and when does stereotyping become offensive? When a Spaniard tells me that all the English wear socks with sandals I smile. Everybody knows that's what we Britons do. When I get told we are all drunkards I think of the news stories showing all those Britons in Magaluf paddling and crawling in pools of beer and puke and I smile again. If I were feeling combative I may rise in defence of all the sober Brits, dismiss the sock myth or even argue the merits of socks to avoid scarred feet and stinking sandals.

I was about to start this paragraph with "I like Spain, I like Spaniards" but then I realised that's not absolutely true. There are plenty of things about the behaviour of some Spaniards, things that are common enough for me to rashly declare that "all Spaniards do this or that" that I definitely do not like. I don't like all of Spain either. Some of it, is in my opinion, a blighted wasteland. There are things I think are actively stupid here - penalising private solar electricity generation and the relatively recent "gagging law" spring to mind. Then again I found plenty to complain about in the UK before I left and I could, Peter Green style, keep you amused for hours complaining about the behaviour of some of my compatriots living here. There are lots of bad similarities between the two counties too - the overbearing pride that "we" did this or that in things like history or sport, the rewriting of history and the jingoistic and chauvanistic in general.

In fact, my general view is that the UK and Spain are, nowadays, pretty similar places. It's not a popular view. I voiced it on a forum about what culture shock people could experience coming to live in Spain. I said there were lots of differences, some of them quite wide differences, but that none of them were of the big kind - no general prohibitions on personal freedom, no threats to basic safety or democratic organisation, not even different clothes. Just another European country. I was thinking about big things like education, healthcare, and the visible economic indicators. The flood of posts after mine listed everything from cruelty to animals and much more visible corruption through to slow Internet connections and poor bank services as evidence that Spain would dish out plenty of culture shock. I stick to my opinion.

And what's the point of this rambling? Well it's to say that I have spent something like 18% of my life in Spain and I'm reasonably clued up about the country. I've visited all but one of the provincial capitals, In a Munro sense I'm missing just one of the Balearic Islands and one of the autonomous cities. I may have been a tourist in most of those cities but I'm not a tourist in Spain. I watch Spanish telly, read Spanish press, wear Spanish clothes, drive a Spanish car, work in Spain, eat Spanish food, buy in Spanish shops. I know what's going on. Anyway it's my blog, my experiences of some of the things, the little things, that happen to me and around me. That's what the blog description says. A personal view, a personally biased view, but not an uninformed view.

I did suggest to the commentator, who wrote in a mix of Spanish and English, that if he were still trying to improve his English we could continue the discussion over a couple of pints of whisky or some tepid tea. He turned me down. He said he'd been considering it until he saw my posts.

Now maybe if I'd promised to wear my Union flag shorts!

The title is taken fom one of the comments. It refers to Brits in Spain and probably more specifically to me.

¿Is that correct?

I've been doing a Spanish class recently. Not that I expect it to make me any more understood in the street. I just feel I have a responsibility to try to improve my Spanish somehow. I would have preferred an intercambio - the half an hour of Spanish for half an hour of English language exchange - but, despite a fair bit of effort, I couldn't find one. Well, actually, that's not true. Alvaró and I met a couple of times but then he went off to seek fame and fortune in Guildford.

So, unable to get  a bit of Spanish for free, I asked a local academy about paying for a weekly grammar class. It's not that exciting but it's structured practice, of a sort, with correction. My teacher is a pleasant and well organised young woman.

"Why not write something for me to correct?" she suggested. So I did. I've done something the last couple of weeks and I was working on this week's piece today. Writing the essay is pretty straightforward. With a biro I can write nearly as quickly in Spanish as in English but as I two finger type the clean copy I see tons of errors, wonder about lots of grammar and spend ages checking spelling and especially accent marks. Tidying up the text can take a long time. I did try writing direct to computer but the mechanics of my two fingered typing inhibit any spontaneity.

Today I was being a bit more playful with my writing than I have been the last couple of times. Well that is if you consider this sort of thing to be playful - The British Empire ran on tea, well tea and gin and tonic - oh, and quite a powerful navy. I included speech in the writing to liven it up a bit too. I started using inverted commas then I remembered, vaguely, that in Spanish the inverted commas are used to quote what someone notable said - Joan of Arc or Henry Kissinger sort of quotes. I asked Google and got a nice piece about how to deal with reporting speech in Spanish. In essence Spanish uses long hyphens, which join to the words and stick with them across line breaks and suchlike, to isolate the speech from normal narrative. There are different rules for how the hyphens are placed under different circumstances and also how to deal with other punctuation marks like full stops and question marks in and around the hyphens. I read it, it made sense and I instantly forgot it.

I was thinking about English punctuation. Do you know, I haven't a clue (probably if you read these blogs critically you do know.) I don't know about how to use parentheses - is the full stop correct and is it in the right place within that last set of brackets for instance? I don't know about single, as against double, inverted commas, I don't know where other marks go in amongst the brackets, quotes, hyphens and what not. My big ally is that I suspect that lots of other people don't know either. Whereas the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves may well have cheered up the sort of person who writes to the BBC about the pronunciation of envelope I'm certain that any ordinary person who slogged through it will no longer remember much, if any, of it.

So, I foresee a truly interesting conversation about how to correctly punctuate Spanish in one of the next classes. Life surely is a riot.

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And here is the text, in Spanish, from a blog called Tinta al sol, about how to do it for anyone interested.

Según el Diccionario panhispánico de dudas de la RAE, lo primero que hay que aclarar es que los diálogos en un texto narrativo no van precedidos de guiones, sino de una raya, que es ligeramente más larga que un guión.

Esta raya antecede a los diálogos, tras una sangría, y sin dejar espacio entre la raya y el comienzo del parlamento.

La raya también enmarca las acotaciones del narrador, y debe cerrarse sólo si el diálogo continúa tras el comentario del narrador.

—Hola, ¿cómo estás? —dijo ella tras verle entrar—. ¿Vas a salir?

—No, no saldré —dijo él sin mirarla.

Cuando se utiliza un verbo de habla para el comentario del narrador (decir, exclamar, afirmar, responder, etc.), éste va en minúscula, aunque el diálogo haya terminado con un signo de puntuación del mismo valor que un punto, como un signo de exclamación o de interrogación.

—¿Eso es todo? —preguntó ella.

Si el diálogo del personaje continúa tras la acotación, y la primera parte termina con coma, punto, punto y coma o dos puntos, este signo de puntuación se coloca tras la raya del cierre.

—Todo —respondió él—. Y tanto que es todo.

Cuando el comentario del narrador no lleva un verbo de habla, la primera parte del diálogo se cierra con un punto, y la acotación comienza con mayúscula. Si el diálogo continúa después, se escribe un punto tras la raya de cierre.

—Estupendo. —Ella se volvió para que no viera su sonrisa—. Me llevo la llave.